Get Your FeedBurner Reader Statistic Using PHP cURL and the FeedBurner API

My favorite part of the Web 2.0 revolution is the abundance of APIs. Everyone has one: Digg, Feedburner, Pownce, Flickr, Google Maps, etc. FeedBurner provides a sweet "Awareness API" that allows you to pull statistics from your FeedBurner account. Here's how you do it using PHP cURL.

The PHP

//open connection
$ch = curl_init();

//set the url, number of POST vars, POST data
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,'http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?id=#######');
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);  
curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT,$timeout);

//execute post
$content = curl_exec($ch);

$subscribers = get_match('/circulation="(.*)"/isU',$content);

echo 'Subscribers:  '.$subscribers;

//close connection
curl_close($ch);


/* helper: does the regex */
function get_match($regex,$content)
{
	preg_match($regex,$content,$matches);
	return $matches[1];
}

It's that easy. What makes this even better is that I hate FeedBurner's "badge" and I can manipulate the result of the above code any way I want. Click here to learn more about FeedBurner's Awareness API and the information you can pull about your feed.